House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ruffled some feathers Monday when she told the Washington Post that, barring a definitive game changer, impeachment was off the table for now.
"I’m not for impeachment," Pelosi said in the wide-ranging interview. "Impeachment is so divisive to the country that unless there’s something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don’t think we should go down that path, because it divides the country. And he’s just not worth it."
The caveat "unless there’s something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan" is important here. Pelosi hasn't ruled out impeachment altogether—what she's indicating is that she wants an environment in which impeachment actually stands a chance of succeeding, at least in a political sense. Effectively, she wants to be on the winning side of initiating impeachment proceedings and, if past is prologue, the public tends to like the political winner in such cases.
In 1974, for instance, a Louis Harris poll released Aug. 4 found that two-thirds of the country supported impeaching President Richard Nixon over the Watergate scandal. Nixon was already perceived to be the political loser, and several days later on Aug. 8, Nixon resigned. By the time he made his exit, support for Nixon’s impeachment had risen 13 points in just the couple of weeks since late July, when the House Judiciary Committee passed three articles of impeachment against him.
The trajectory of increasing support for Nixon's impeachment versus his waning popularity is important here. Pew Research used Gallup polling to make the chart below, and although the numbers don't perfectly match the Harris poll above, there's a similar spike in public support for impeachment from late July to Nixon’s Aug. 8 resignation. The other notable element here is the fact that, while Nixon's approvals dipped below 50 percent in April of 1973, support for his impeachment didn't break 50 percent until well over a year later, in July of 1974.
The lag between Nixon's plummeting approvals and majority-plus support for his impeachment bears some resemblance to recent polling showing that, while 64 percent of voters believe Donald Trump has "committed crimes," only 35 percent currently support initiating impeachment proceedings. That's likely partly because only 45 percent of voters are convinced Trump committed crimes while in office. But some of the public's reluctance on impeachment may stem from purely external factors, such as the fact that the nation is experiencing relatively decent economic times. In fact, some historians believe one of the differences between the overwhelming support for Nixon's impeachment and flagging support for impeaching President Bill Clinton in the late '90s was the economic prosperity at the time of the latter, and the fact that government was actually functioning quite well under Clinton's leadership. In the early '70s, by contrast, public trust in government had taken a hit, in part due to the increasingly unpopular Vietnam war.
The differences in the political climate surrounding Nixon and Clinton as they faced impeachment were numerous, not to mention the fact that their offenses varied wildly. But their approval ratings in advance of the proceedings (which never actually took place in Nixon's case) were perhaps most telling. As noted up top, Nixon's approvals had dropped off a cliff, hovering at around 25 percent for most of 1974. Meanwhile, Clinton's approvals floated above 60 percent for most of 1998. And after the GOP House approved two articles of impeachment against Clinton on Dec. 19, 1998, Clinton's approvals jumped 10 points, from 63 percent before the vote to 73 percent after the vote. He was a winner in the public’s view. Five weeks later, the Senate began Clinton's impeachment trial on Jan. 7, 1999, and ultimately voted on Feb. 12 to acquit him on both impeachment articles.
It's somewhat difficult to do a direct comparison of approvals for Clinton and Nixon versus those for Trump, because Trump's approval ratings are so historically abysmal that he's never even broken 45 percent, according to Gallup. But the figure to pay attention to is support for initiating impeachment proceedings against Trump, which still only garners about a third of voters, including just 30 percent of independents. That figure may change as House investigations and hearings reveal more of Trump's malfeasance for voters to digest. External factors, like the state of the economy, will also likely play a role.
Pelosi is certainly setting a high bar for initiating impeachment proceedings, which even under the best of circumstances are unlikely to attract much support from GOP lawmakers, if any. She clearly wants, and arguably needs, public support among basically everyone but GOP voters to be in favor of Trump's impeachment. The Republican-led Senate is about as likely to impeach a sitting GOP president as Trump is to resign—not at all. But Trump's crimes may simply be so great that House Democrats can't possibly continue to ignore them.
In that case, Pelosi will be able to say, I was never for impeachment, but Trump's unprecedented level of criminality was something we simply couldn't ignore, given our sworn oath to uphold the Constitution. At that point, the voters will be left to decide who betrayed them—House Democrats by impeaching Trump, or Senate Republicans by acquitting him. And if support for impeachment is historically high, Democrats have a fighting chance of winning that political argument.